THE BRUSHLESS ROTARY TATTOO MACHINE

January 03, 2015

IT’S 2016, WHERE ARE ALL THE BRUSHLESS ROTARIES?!

Tattoo machine builder and owner forums are full of topics about brushless motors, but all the builders still use brushed motors. Why is this? Are brushless motor not the best rotary tattoo machine motors around? Of course they are.

A brushless motor has up to six times better power to weight ratio, than the best brushed motors out there. It doesn’t have the graphite brushes, that wear out fast and get grinded into unsanitary graphite powder. It can be built in a way that makes it autoclavable, while a brushed motor can never be, because the brushes would turn to mush. A brushless can also spin at higher speeds than a brushed motor, but keeps all of it’s torque down to almost zero RPM, so much so, that you could actually use a properly designed brushless rotary tattoo machine to simulate a hand tapping technique. Actually the brushless rotary tattoo machine now has a potential to become the best machine flavor of them all. Because the light and powerful brushless motors can deliver power and hit, that is going into coil machine territory.

"So; if the best rotary tattoo machine motor is a brushless one, why aren’t all the companies and builders all over them?"

Well… there’s a catch. To power a brushless motor you cannot just use a normal tattoo power supply, you need power modulation, or PWM; the power needs to get delivered to the motor in impulses. And you can buy brushless speed controllers off the shelf. But hey are designed for running under a constant load of a propeller or RC car, but the load in a tattoo machine is all but constant. You are effectively loading and unloading the motor many times per second and the motor and controller doesn’t like this.

It is therefore necessary to design a motor and power supply with a controller specifically for this application. You must then figure out a complicated algorithm to control the motor at all speeds and loads. And we have done just that; others build a tattoo machine frame and buy a ready made motor. We designed and built the whole thing, motor, power supply and all. That’s why ours is the lightest, most powerful and fully autoclavable (including the motor) while others are not. That’s why we think we may have just designed the best tattoo machine ever. But you be the judge of that.